Understanding Free vs. Paid Users in Fathom Team Edition (Legacy Plans)

For our new plans (Team and Business), free seats are no longer available. All free users will need to upgrade to a paid seat to continue using Fathom.

If you’re still on one of our legacy plans (Standard or Pro), free seats are still supported. Below, we’ve outlined the key differences between paid and free seats under those plans.

Access

• Can view calls under Team Calls.

• For their own calls, they have access to the free version of Fathom, which includes:

  • A General/Enhanced summary of calls.

  • No Advanced AI Summaries or Action Item Detection.

Sharing & Upgrades

• Free users' calls are private by default — they are not shared with the team unless the user actively chooses to share them.

• If a free user shares a call with the team, that user is automatically upgraded to a paid seat. This means their account will count toward your plan's paid seat total going forward.

• If you'd like to prevent this from happening automatically, you can restrict it under Team Settings.

Common Use Cases

• Ideal for managers who:

  • Don't take many calls or notes.

  • Need to review team calls.

• Also great for Product teams who want to:

  • View calls.

  • Extract insights about customer interactions.

💡 Heads up! After moving a teammate to a free seat, they'll still have access to Premium features for a limited time only — this gives them a short grace period before the full downgrade kicks in.

Key changes made:

• "private by default" replaces the passive "aren't shared unless..." — makes the default state immediately clear.

• "that user is automatically upgraded to a paid seat" replaces "that call is automatically converted to paid" — fixes the core confusion you flagged.

• Added "their account will count toward your plan's paid seat total" so admins understand the billing implication, not just the label change.

• Moved the Settings restriction note into its own sentence so it doesn't get buried at the end of a parenthetical.

• Access

  • Full access to:

    • Advanced AI Summaries.

    • Action Item Detection.

    • All 17 summary templates.

  • Their calls are automatically shared to Team View.

• Features for Non-Sharing Users

  • Even if a user doesn’t share calls, marking them as Paid provides access to:

    • Advanced AI Summaries.

    • Action Items.

    • CRM Sync.

    • Other advanced features.

• Automatic Conversion to Paid

  • A user is automatically converted to Paid when they share their first call. This setting can be turned off in your Team Settings.

• Admins

  • All Admins are considered Paid Users.